200k-year-old hand art found near a Tibetan hot spring • Hacker News Board

Re: 200k-year-old hand art found near a Tibetan hot spring

#91

Post by adolph » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 1:17 AM UTC

cletus wrote: post #48

themgt wrote: post #5

Found at 14,000ft on the Tibetan Plateau. Very likely altitude adapted denisovans, whose genetic adaptations to living in such low oxygen are still present in modern day Tibetans. Really incredible.

What was the evolutionary advantage that being able to live at high altitudes 200,000 years ago gave you? There really weren't that many people around so finding land with available food and water doesn't seem like it would be that much of an issue. One possible argument is that such people would transit high altitudes going between hunting grounds (for example) but is this really enough pressure to produce a genetic…

High altitude survival probably wasn’t as important as the advantages of efficient oxygen use. Imagine living every day like you blood dope like Lance Armstrong!

Live high/train low is a training method in which athletes live at high altitude and train at low altitude, usually with the goal of improving performance at sea level. The main idea is to reap the benefits of high altitude acclimatization while maintaining the intensity of low altitude training.

https://www.nsca.com/education/articles/nsca-coach/is-live-h...

Re: 200k-year-old hand art found near a Tibetan hot spring

#92

Post by adolph » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 1:23 AM UTC

Aardwolf wrote: post #21

200k years ago, that's incredible, not even the wildest science fiction can imagine what the world will look like 200k years from now

Well, not to give away the plot, but two of the things that happen are the Y10k event and then the Y100K event. You’d think people would be well prepared but people are still people—there is a ton more legacy code each time and they don’t know if the fixes will really work until it happens.

Re: 200k-year-old hand art found near a Tibetan hot spring

#93

Post by adolph » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 1:27 AM UTC

csomar wrote: post #34

Given that the Tibet is particularly cold place, shouldn't these humans wear something to resist the cold? Can humans (or any fur-less animals) survive such cold climate without extra-fat or really good clothes?

Early practitioners of Wim Hof

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wim_Hof

Re: 200k-year-old hand art found near a Tibetan hot spring

#94

Post by exporectomy » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 1:34 AM UTC

yesimahuman wrote: post #74

willcipriano wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I disagree, there is something special about this moment in time. Your ancestors all felt the same way. So will your children.

It’s likely they will all look back at this particular period of a hundred or so years as one of the most pivotal times for at least one really big reason: that’s when we set the climate on a path of destruction

Why not when we invented nuclear weapons and set civilization on the path of destruction? Or when we invented fertilizer and set the wilderness on the path of destruction or when we started applying science and set traditional stabilizing religious cultures on the path of destruction? I know why. It's because you're overwhelmed with your own contemporary culture which has indoctrinated you to believe that particular doomsday prophecy. Other cultures have/had different ones and that will surely continue into the future.

Re: 200k-year-old hand art found near a Tibetan hot spring

#95

Post by AbrahamParangi » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 1:39 AM UTC

bspammer wrote: post #55

willcipriano wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I disagree, there is something special about this moment in time. Your ancestors all felt the same way. So will your children.

It doesn't really matter what my ancestors felt, it's blatently obvious that there's more going on right now, and faster than 10,000 years ago. Back then, you'd be lucky to see a single revolutionary invention in a lifetime. Now we're seeing them every decade, if not annually. I don't disagree that my descendents will be justified in feeling the same way, as long as the exponential curve keeps on going and civilizati…

By symmetry of the exponential curve, your ancestors would be just as justified.

Re: 200k-year-old hand art found near a Tibetan hot spring

#96

Post by exporectomy » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 1:53 AM UTC

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #81

bspammer wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure if you look at it from a purely mathematical point of view, but we can anchor ourselves to something which is (relatively) constant - the human lifespan. We're one of the first generations to feel the effects of the exponential curve within our lifetimes.

If you plot anything exponential from t=T-60 years to t=T, it'll look just as dramatic now as ever. Try it. Plot Imagine you have some function like population or number of transistors per dollar or something that's exponential. You can model it as y(t) = a * b^(t+c). To look at how it feels when you look backwards, make it relative to what life is like today (aka divide by the "normal" value y(t) to get a function o…

You're neglecting the fact that human development is not exponential. Population, for instance increased in its growth rate over the past 1000 years, with a sudden step up due to the industrial revolution. It didn't look the same 1000 years ago as it does today. The growth rate was less than 10% of what it is now. If population was exponential, the growth rate would be constant.

Re: 200k-year-old hand art found near a Tibetan hot spring

#97

Post by booleandilemma » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 1:53 AM UTC

willcipriano wrote: post #52

bspammer wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, there is something special about this moment in time. We're in an insane inflection point of human development. For millions of years things stayed roughly the same. It's really only in the last 10,000 years that stuff has really kicked off, and the last 300 where human development has gone absolutely crazy. There's several existential threats that might destroy civilization over the next few hundred year…

> I disagree, there is something special about this moment in time. Your ancestors all felt the same way. So will your children.

So will your children

We’ve been on a long upward curve of progress for awhile now, but this isn’t guaranteed to continue forever. The future could be a mad max / book of eli hellscape that may set us back two thousand years.

Re: 200k-year-old hand art found near a Tibetan hot spring

#98

Post by 7773777 » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 1:55 AM UTC

scollet wrote: post #45

Sharlin wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the universe was an appreciable fraction younger, all life on Earth was unicellular.

And those uncultured bastards didn't even think to leave a note.

A monoculture is still a culture!

Re: 200k-year-old hand art found near a Tibetan hot spring

#99

Post by booleandilemma » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 2:07 AM UTC

Aardwolf wrote: post #21

200k years ago, that's incredible, not even the wildest science fiction can imagine what the world will look like 200k years from now

Hopefully people thinking about us 200k years from now will consider us as primitive as we consider the people from 200k years ago.

Re: 200k-year-old hand art found near a Tibetan hot spring

#100

Post by booleandilemma » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 2:24 AM UTC

tshaddox wrote: post #57

bspammer wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, there is something special about this moment in time. We're in an insane inflection point of human development. For millions of years things stayed roughly the same. It's really only in the last 10,000 years that stuff has really kicked off, and the last 300 where human development has gone absolutely crazy. There's several existential threats that might destroy civilization over the next few hundred year…

Could it be that in the distant future if you at human history (or even the history of life on Earth) from far enough away to smooth out the little bumps, it turns out that we 20th and 21st century humans are in fact in a pretty unremarkable point along an exponential curve?

The past 200 or so years have included the invention of the lightbulb and the first trips to our moon and other planets. Given how long we’ve been on the planet, I think this is indeed a special time and future historians will always look upon this era that way. They’ll probably refer to it as when humanity started walking, or spoke its first word.